Then Ben of the magic voice spoke these mystic words through the trumpet, and the butcher went off comforted, and Miss Dewsbury smiled at her favourite; and when he told her that he had come to ask a special favour of her, she was so gracious that Ben felt he would have no difficulty in carrying out his project. But when she understood what he wanted, things did not go so easily. To be sure, she did not use the piano, she said, but then that was no reason why any one else should use it for her. Ben stood waiting patiently until she should have exhausted all her eloquence, and then he stooped down, and quietly picked one or two suckers off a lemon-tree, and took his pruning-knife from his pocket, and snipped off a faded branch. After this, with quiet deliberation, he twirled his great moustaches. That settled the matter. “You may have the piano,” she said, “but you must fetch it yourself.” Ben did not think it necessary to add that he had already arranged for it to be fetched at once, and he lingered a little while with her, listening to her complaint about the men she employed and about their laziness, which she observed through the opera-glass. Ben was just going to suggest that perhaps the opera-glass made the men lazy, when he remembered that he must be circumspect, and so he contrived some beautiful speech about the immorality of laziness; he even asked for a glass of skimmed milk, and off he cantered, raising his hat and bowing chivalrously to the old lady rancher. Before very long, her piano stood in Robert Strafford’s little house, and Ben spent a long time in cleaning and dusting it. After he had finished this task, he became very restless, and finally went down to the workshop and made a rough letter-box, which he fixed on to a post and placed at the corner of the road leading up to his friend’s ranch. Two hours were left. He did a little gardening and watered the tiny grass-plot. He looked at the sky. Blue-black clouds were hovering over the mountains, obscuring some and trying to envelop others. “We are in for a storm,” he said. “It is making straight for this part from Grevilles Mountain. But I hope it won’t come to-night. It will be a poor welcome to Bob’s wife, though it’s about time now for the land to have a thorough good drenching.” He looked at the pretty valley with its belt of trees, seen at its best from the hill where Robert’s house was built. At all times of the year, there was that green stretch yonder of clustering trees, nestling near the foothills, which in their turn seemed to nestle up to the rugged mountains.